Updates

Uber Suspends Self-Driving Car Fleet

Aaron Josefczyk / Reuters

Uber has pulled its self-driving cars, the company announced Wednesday evening. The fleet of cars in San Francisco lasted a week before California regulators ordered the company to stop the operation. The Department of Motor Vehicles revoked the vehicles’ registrations. In a statement, Uber said the company is looking for locations to redeploy the cars, but said they “remain 100 percent committed to California and will be redoubling our efforts to develop workable statewide rules.” The company launched a pilot program in San Francisco on December 14, where riders could request an UberX and match with an autonomous vehicle. Shortly after the launch, the DMV told Uber that it “must cease” operation, as the company did not have the necessary permit. The California government says that other companies, including Mercedes-Benz, Google, and Tesla are testing driverless cars with proper permits.

Louisiana Will Provide Every State Trooper With a Body Camera

Dave Martin / Reuters

Louisiana will supply all 700 of its state troopers with body cameras, becoming the first state in the U.S. to provide the service. Troopers in the French Quarter of New Orleans will be the first to wear cameras, starting in January. The full rollout will be done by the summer. Governor John Bel Edwards, in announcing the initiative Wednesday, said the state will purchase 1,550 body cameras so each trooper has a backup. The cameras are made to start recording as soon as an officer pulls out a taser. The initiative will cost the state $5.3 million over five years. Baton Rouge, the state capital, was the site of several protests this year following the July shooting of Alton Sterling, a black man, at the hands of police. Sterling’s death is still under investigation. Some troopers in Alabama and New Jersey also use body cameras, The News-Starreports.

Ikea Will Pay $50 Million for Wrongful Deaths of Three Toddlers

Yves Herman / Reuters

Ikea has agreed to pay $50 million to the families of three toddlers who were killed by dressers that tipped over on them. The families sued the Swedish furniture maker for wrongful deaths, arguing the dressers were designed without meeting safety and stability standards. In late June, Ikea recalled 29 million dressers. “No amount of money will make up for the loss of our sweet little boy,” Janet McGee, the Minnesota mother of 22-month-old Ted who died in February, told the Philadelphia Inquirer. The two other families are from Pennsylvania and Washington. Both of those boys died in 2014. The settlement will be split between the three families. Ikea will also donate $50,000 each to three children’s hospitals in the boys’ names. Ikea has also agreed raise awareness of the danger of furniture that could tip over.

Brazilian Firms to Pay Billions in Bribery Settlement

Two Brazilian firms plead guilty Wednesday to bribery charges and agreed to pay at least $3.5 billion to settle what the Justice Department has called the “largest foreign bribery case” in history. Odebrecht SA, Brazil’s largest construction firm, and Braskem SA, an affiliated petrochemical company, admitted to violating American foreign bribery laws by giving kickbacks to officials of Petrobras, Brazil’s largest company and state-run oil firm. Petrobras has been the center of a major corruption scheme, in which the company’s executives conspired with politicians and business leaders to secure contracts in exchange for bribes. The scandal has embroiled many of Brazil’s leaders, including former President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva. Under the settlement, Odebrecht and Braskem have agreed to pay $2.6 billion and $957 million, respectively, to U.S., Brazilian, and Swiss authorities.

Death Toll in Explosion at Mexican Fireworks Market Rises to 31

The aftermath of an explosion at the San Pablito fireworks market in Tultepec, Mexico, on December 20, 2016. (Edgard Garrido / Reuters)

The death toll in the explosion at an open-air fireworks market in Mexico rose to 31 on Wednesday, The Guardianreports. At least 72 people, including 10 children, were treated for injuries sustained in the incident in the San Pablito market in Tultepec on Tuesday, the AP reported Wednesday, citing local health officials. Some of the injured have severe burns, some on over 90 percent of their bodies. Hundreds of people were browsing the stalls at San Pablito when the explosion occurred, engulfing the market in flames and sending large plumes of smoke into the air. “Everything was catching fire. Everything was exploding,” Crescencia Francisco Garcia told the AP. “The stones were flying, pieces of brick, everything was flying.” Tultepec Mayor Armando Fuentes said the market was well-stocked because of the holiday season, when demand for fireworks rises. Fuentes said the sale of fireworks “is what gives us identity” in Tultepec. “We know it is high-risk, we regret this greatly, but unfortunately many people's livelihoods depend on this activity,” he said. The cause of the explosion is not yet known. Similar fires struck the same market in 2005 and 2006, destroying hundreds of stalls.

Tokyo Says 2020 Olympics Will Cost Nearly $17 Billion

Toru Hanai / Reuters

The 2020 Olympics in Tokyo are expected to cost upwards of $16.8 billion, according to organizers who released an updated financial estimate Wednesday to the International Olympic Committee (IOC). Tokyo originally estimated the total cost to be much lower, at about $6.2 billion, when it first won hosting rights in 2013. But that nearly quadrupled, with an early estimate this October of $25.4 billion. The IOC and the Olympics have been criticized recently for exorbitant hosting costs after Beijing spent $40 billion on the 2008 Summer Olympics, and Russia set a record by spending $50 billion into the 2014 Winter Olympics. That type of investment led many cities to pull their bids for the 2022 and 2024 games. To control this type of spending in the future, the IOC capped Tokyo’s limit at $17 billion. Tokyo’s governor, Yuriko Koike, said Wednesday that a recent budget review led to a $340 million cost cut, and that further reviews are expected.

Ethiopia Releases 9,800 People Arrested Under State of Emergency

Tiksa Negeri / Reuters

Ethiopia said Wednesday it will release 9,800 people detained under a state of emergency declared in October, but also plans to charge 2,500 others with destabilizing the country. Protests began last year after the government proposed to expand the borders of its capital city, Addis Ababa, into surrounding territory occupied largely by the ethnic Oromo people. These protesters called the proposal a tactic to expand control over their somewhat autonomous region, and were soon joined by people of the Amhara region, where the government had tried a similar plan. Combined, these two ethnic groups make up more than 60 percent of the population, although the two have a contentious history. The government has reportedly killed 400 people in its violent crackdowns in the last year, many of them students. The violence has widely been described as the worst in the country since Ethiopia’s ruling party came to power in 1991. A government spokesman explained in a cryptic message to the AP that the people being released would pose no further trouble, because they “have been given lots of trainings.“

Berliners Mourn Victims as Police Search for Driver in Deadly Rampage

German authorities are looking for a Tunisian man whose documents were found in the truck that rammed into a crowded Christmas market in Berlin Monday, the AP reported Wednesday. The AP has obtained a European arrest warrant from Germany for the suspect, 24-year-old Anis Amri. According to the warrant, man was has used six different aliases and three different nationalities—Tunisian, Egyptian, and Lebanese. The notice warns that he may be armed. German officials told the AP the man applied for asylum in Germany but the request was rejected in July. Reuters reports German police are offering a reward of 100,000 euros ($105,000) for information leading to his capture. Officials are investigating the rampage, which left 12 people dead and 48 injured, as an act of terrorism. Berlin police have received more than 500 tips regarding the attack, according to the AP. Police arrested a Pakistani man near the market soon after the rampage, but released him the next day because they did not have evidence connecting him to the attack. The Islamic State on Tuesday claimed responsibility for the attack, but it’s not clear whether the terrorist group actually knows who was behind it. Berliners gathered on Wednesday in front of a church in the city to honor the victims, signing “We Are the World” and holding signs that read, “You will not divide us.”

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Years later, many adults still pine for the days their school libraries, auditoriums, and gyms transformed into pop-up bookstores.

In the early 1980s, the world of school book fairs was “a highly competitive and very secretive industry,” according to a New York Timesarticleat the time. The fairs numbered in the thousands and spanned the United States. They were put on by a mix of organizers: A few national corporations, about 25 to 30 regional companies, and assorted bookstores.

By the 1990s, one organizer reigned: the Scholastic Corporation. Scholastic, founded in 1920 to publish books and magazines aimed at young readers, had purchased several of its smaller competitors. The company became the largest operator of children’s book fairs in the country, a title it still holds today.

But we’re not here to talk about Scholastic’s business history, and I think you know that. If you’re a young adult who attended elementary school in the United States, I’d guess that when you saw the headline on this story, something deep inside your mind cracked open. With an unmistakable pang of nostalgia,the memory of a Scholastic book fair, with all its concomitant joys, came flooding in.

Despite the easing of taboos and the rise of hookup apps, Americans are in the midst of a sex recession.

These should be boom times for sex.

The share of Americans who say sex between unmarried adults is “not wrong at all” is at an all-time high. New cases of HIV are at an all-time low. Most women can—at last—get birth control for free, and the morning-after pill without a prescription.

If hookups are your thing, Grindr and Tinder offer the prospect of casual sex within the hour. The phrase If something exists, there is porn of it used to be a clever internet meme; now it’s a truism. BDSM plays at the local multiplex—but why bother going? Sex is portrayed, often graphically and sometimes gorgeously, on prime-time cable. Sexting is, statistically speaking, normal.

Donald Trump likes to pit elite and non-elite white people against each other. Why do white liberals play into his trap?

“I want them to talk about racism every day,” Steve Bannon, President Donald Trump’s former strategist, told The American Prospectlast year. “If the left is focused on race and identity, and we go with economic nationalism, we can crush the Democrats.”

Bannon was tapping into an old American tradition. As early as the 1680s, powerful white people were serving up racism to assuage the injuries of class, elevating the status of white indentured servants over that of enslaved black people. Some two centuries later, W. E. B. Du Bois observed that poor white people were compensated partly by a “public and psychological wage”—the “wages of whiteness,” as the historian David Roediger memorably put it. These wages pit people of different races against one another, averting a coalition based on shared economic interests.

At an inaugural desert festival of yogis and spirit guides like Russell Brand, an exclusive industry grapples with consumerism, addiction, and the actual meaning of wellness.

I first felt reality shift when, at 7 a.m. on a Saturday, there was a line for a class called Body Blast Bootcamp, and I worried that there wouldn’t be enough room for everyone.

The draw to this explicitly not-fun undertaking, others in line told me, was that we would be glad to have done it when it was over. We all made it in, and the workout studio was a carpeted conference room where an Instagram-famous instructor with a microphone headset was waiting to give us high fives. “The hardest step is showing up!”

Once we started working out, a person walked around apparently taking Instagram videos, and people were not bothered by this. Another brought a mini tripod to get some shots of herself in action. There was shouting and a Coldplay house remix. Someone offered me a box of alkaline water, and I drank it because no neutral water was available.

Another big project has found that only half of studies can be repeated. And this time, the usual explanations fall flat.

Over the past few years, an international team of almost 200 psychologists has been trying to repeat a set of previously published experiments from its field, to see if it can get the same results. Despite its best efforts, the project, called Many Labs 2, has only succeeded in 14 out of 28 cases. Six years ago, that might have been shocking. Now it comes as expected (if still somewhat disturbing) news.

In recent years, it has become painfully clear that psychology is facing a “reproducibility crisis,” in which even famous, long-established phenomena—the stuff of textbooks and TED Talks—might not be real. There’s social priming, where subliminal exposures can influence our behavior. And ego depletion, the idea that we have a limited supply of willpower that can be exhausted. And the marshmallow test, where our ability to resist gratification in early childhood predicts our achievements in later life. And the facial-feedback hypothesis, which simply says that smiling makes us feel happier.

The civil-liberties organization has taken a stand against stronger due-process protections in campus tribunals that undermines its own principles.

Last week, the NRA kept defending gun rights, the AARP kept advocating for older Americans, and the California Avocado Commission was as steadfast as ever in touting “nature’s highest achievement.” By contrast, the ACLU issued a public statement that constituted a stark, shortsighted betrayal of the organization’s historic mission: It vehemently opposed stronger due-process rights for the accused.

The matter began when Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos put forth new guidelines on how to comply with Title IX, the law that forbids colleges that receive federal funding to exclude any students, deny them benefits, or subject them to any discrimination on the basis of sex.

The most controversial changes concern what happens when a student stands accused of sexual misbehavior. “Under the new rules, schools would be required to hold live hearings and would no longer rely on a so-called single investigator model,” TheNew York Timesreports. “Accusers and students accused of sexual assault must be allowed to cross-examine each other through an adviser or lawyer. The rules require that the live hearings be conducted by a neutral decision maker and conducted with a presumption of innocence. Both parties would have equal access to all the evidence that school investigators use to determine facts of the case, and a chance to appeal decisions.” What’s more, colleges will now have the option to choose a somewhat higher evidentiary standard, requiring “clear and convincing evidence” rather than “a preponderance of the evidence” in order to establish someone’s guilt.

Their huge mounds cover an area the size of Britain, and are visible from space.

In the east of Brazil, mysterious cones of earth rise from the dry, hard-baked soil. Each of these mounds is about 30 feet wide at its base, and stands six to 13 feet tall. From the ground, with about 60 feet of overgrown land separating each mound from its neighbors, it’s hard to tell how many there are. But their true extent becomes dramatically clear from space.

Using satellite images, Roy Funch from the State University of Feira de Santana has estimated that there are about 200 million of these mounds. They’re arrayed in an uncannily regular honeycomb-like pattern. Together, they cover an area roughly the size of Great Britain or Oregon, and they occupy as much space as the Great Pyramid of Giza 4,000 times over. And this colossal feat of engineering is, according to Funch, the work of the tiniest of engineers—a species of termite called Syntermes dirus, whose workers are barely half an inch long.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez arrives in Congress with a bigger megaphone than any other House freshman. How's she going to use it?

QUEENS, N.Y.—“Choosing not to speak,” Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was telling me one day last month, “is taken and read just as deliberately as choosing to speak.”

Fresh off her upset primary victory over Representative Joe Crowley here, the nation’s most famous congressional candidate was speaking pretty much everywhere this summer—stumping for fellow progressives all over the country, hitting the late-night talk shows, and jousting with her many conservative critics on Twitter.

Last week, Ocasio-Cortez made her Washington debut in similar fashion.

In town for the biannual weeklong orientation session for newly elected members of Congress, the 29-year-old progressive star from the Bronx narrated the experience in Instagram stories to her 642,000 followers, complained about being mistaken for a congressional spouse or intern on Twitter, and called out a conservative journalist who suggested she was dressed too fancily for “a girl who struggles.”

At an international conference, allies grieved the loss of the United States they had believed in.

Updated at 2:50 p.m. ET on November 19, 2018

The Halifax Security Forum is designed to be a gathering of the world’s democratic countries, which are allied to protect each other. Hosted by the Canadian defense minister, the Forum’s signature is the brief videos that introduce the annual gathering. This year’s intro showed relay runners, mostly American, at the Olympics from Berlin in 1936 forward, ending in an uncertain baton handoff—a powerful metaphor for the free world’s worries about American leadership in the age of Trump.*

The Halifax Forum, occurring just after President Donald Trump unleashed yet another petulant tirade against Germany and France that culminated in the unseemly taunt that Parisians were speaking German until the U.S. intervened in World Wars I and II, had a funereal feel this year. Allies are grieving the loss of an America they believed in, as it sinks in that they cannot rely on us any longer.